Omega (alien philosopher-troll)

By tradition, “Omega” is the standard name of the alien philosopher-troll who goes around putting humans into weird dilemmas. If you ever see five people tied to a trolley track, it’s probably Omega who tied them there. Omega has awesome material powers, an incredibly accurate ability to predict human behavior, and rather inscrutable motives.

Some of Omega’s known properties:

• Omega is extremely adept at predicting human behavior. It has no known error rate over hundreds of experiments. noteSo why the heck does Omega bother doing these so-called experiments? We can’t be generating new information for It. At present we have no better hypothesis for Omega’s motives than ‘putting people into weird experiments is a terminal value in Omega’s preferences’.

• Omega is extremely adept at assessing human emotions, and can scale the outcomes of an experiment such that you are exactly 100 times happier about going from outcome A to outcome B, than you would be about the further improvement from B to C.

• Omega obtains the money It uses for monetary awards by selling electricity into various markets around the world—presumably so the subjects in Its experiments will know that Omega’s monetary awards are not zero-sum wealth redistributions.

• Omega only interacts with a given human once, presumably so reputational effects aren’t an issue.

• Omega always leaves before the actual results of Its experiment are known; the experiment itself is carried out by automatic mechanisms. noteWhy would It bother observing the results of Its so-called experiments? Its prior predictions have never been wrong!

• Omega has always been perfectly truthful in how Its notes describe the experimental setup to the people caught up in them. So far as we know, It never lies and there’s never been any important feature of Its experiments that It has failed to describe.

• Omega has stated for the record that, while It constructs extremely detailed models of humans, It always makes sure that that these models do not have internal subjective experiences. Presumably this ensures that if you experience yourself being inside one of Omega’s experiments, you can be certain that your current experiences belong to the real you rather than an Omega-simulation of you.

• Omega has stated for the record that it does not use any form of time travel in making its seemingly perfect predictions, only ordinary computational inference.

• Omega has stated for the record that it does not exert any form of psychological influence over the humans in its experiments, barring the experiment itself—that is, its seemingly perfect predictive record is not being obtained by mind control.

• Omega has not been known to interact with the Random Omnipotent Being that goes around portaling people into alternate universes, but they’re suspected to belong to the same species.

• Omega seems to have no concern for human life except as fodder for Its experiments. It can and does follow through on threats to destroy thousands of lives. If you find yourself in one of Its experiments, take it seriously. noteSomebody at the SCP Foundation needs to do something about this guy. He’s been getting worse.